


public threats

by Areiton



Series: in the cold, we find warmth [5]
Category: Captain America (Movies), Iron Man (Movies), Marvel Cinematic Universe, The Avengers (Marvel Movies)
Genre: Bucky Barnes Needs a Hug, M/M, POV Bucky Barnes, Post-Captain America: The Winter Soldier, Protective Bucky Barnes, Tony Stark Has A Heart, Tony Stark Needs a Hug
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2019-07-17
Updated: 2019-07-17
Packaged: 2020-06-30 08:05:17
Rating: Not Rated
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 871
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/19849009
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/Areiton/pseuds/Areiton





	public threats

He watches the news. 

He ran for two months after leaving the safe house in Moscow, laid down enough false trails that Steve Rogers and his metal winged sidekick would be busy for years. 

He doesn’t fool himself into thinking that Tony will follow them. If he knows anything about the man who helped him, it’s that Tony is smart enough to know exactly where he is--the distance and freedom he has are only because Tony is letting him go. 

Still. The illusion is there, the illusion that he is alone, forgotten by the entire world. 

He watches the news and reads. It’s different than when he was reading in Moscow--this is intel, gathering information. 

~*~ 

The Widow dumped everything on the internet and it makes it easy for him. Jamie spends three weeks pouring through it, searching for every hidden report that even hinted at what he'd done. 

It wasn't hard. 

What was hard was carrying the weight of if, once he knew. 

~*~ 

It's lonely. 

He reminds himself, sometimes, of all the years he spent alone, the cold solitude of the Hydra base, the contentment he found in being alone while surrounded by guards and Handlers. 

The quiet empty lonely ice that wrapped around him like a familiar blanket. 

This lonely is different, active and taunting and he finds himself listening to music and books and people jabbering about nothing in languages he doesn’t speak, all to drown out the silence he didn’t know was waiting. 

~*~ 

He reads and sometimes, he wishes he could forget. 

He reads and he longs for the cold metal of his chair and the plastic bite of the mouth guard and the white hot pain that made everything simple. 

He reads and he throws up and he cries. 

And when his rage and grief quiet and leave him trembling--he reads. 

~*~ 

He is in Peru when he hears about the Mandarian, pausing in the middle of peeling an orange to stare at the man babbling nonsense on screen. 

It bothers Jamie, but he can’t put his finger on why. 

~*~ 

A week later, Tony Stark stalks out of a hospital, his eyes bright and beautiful and shiny wet, his mouth set in a furious line, and threatens a terrorist on live television. 

Jamie watches that with a calm that doesn’t feel like his own, that feels achingly remote, while panic curls and tugs at the glacial lake he sinks into. 

He watches Tony slip into his car and drive away and a pretty news anchor flutters on screen, talking and talking and talking. 

Jamie looks at the stacks of little notebooks, the weight of his sins and the little origami rose his drone brought him, in that Russian safehouse and he stands. 

~*~ 

He isn’t a killer. Not anymore. He isn’t a weapon for Hydra to point and pull the trigger. 

For a long time, he didn’t know who he was, without that to ground him. To claim him. 

Now it tugs at him, and it calls him home, a gentle leash, a silken collar. 

He isn’t a weapon and he isn’t Hydra’s. 

He is Jamie. 

And Tony is his. 

~*~ 

He goes north. He is good at moving without being detected and the only one he’s worried about looking should be in Bangkok right now, tucked between the red lights and death defying scooters. It’s easy, almost soothing, numbing the worry, ever present and persistent, for Tony. 

He takes a rattling bus to the border and crosses under the cover of darkness and the baying of cyotoes in the night, hushed whispered and too-loud footsteps dogging him. A boy clings to his hand and Jamie pulls him along, trusts his mother to follow and when they are safe, when she is crying and cradling her boy on free soil--he melts into nothing, and keeps going. 

North and west, like a bird called home to nest--he goes. 

~*~ 

There’s nothing there, when he arrives. A crumbling wreckage that was once a house, a construction crew babbling about flying suits. He stares at it from the trees, hidden, until they leave with the setting sun, and then picks his way into the wreckage. 

This was Tony’s  _ home _ and an asshole with a particularly shitty beard destroyed it. 

And him?

He shivers away from that, away from that thought. 

~*~ 

He waits. It’s easy, to slip into the crew and clear away the wreckage, and he listens, when they talk about the attack in Miami, the plane going down and Iron Man’s reappearance, the battle on a tanker. 

Tony Stark is alive, then. 

He smiles and shifts some more of the wreckage and pulls a bent and broken robot from the stones and rubble. 

“Boss,” he says, “Got something Mr. Stark will want to see.”

~*~ 

He waits. 

~*~ 

The rubble is long since cleared, and the crew moved on to other jobs, and he is still there, waiting, endlessly patient, when an orange Audi trundles up to the cliff. 

He breathes out, watching Tony step out and load his bots, watching him stare at the place he had lived and should have died. 

He waits, patient, until finally, finally, that bright dark gaze finds him. 

And Tony smiles, “Hi, Jamie.” 


End file.
